TWO TOWERS behind the scenes effects talk stuff..

Hey folks, Harry here... it is fine to be completely envious of the following person. I understand the feeling... The idea of waiting to the 29th is killing me. I want to see it all now. NOW. God I hope ATTACK OF THE CLONES rules my ass in May, along with SPIDER-MAN.... I need a distraction to thrill me and get my mind off of LOTR. The wait is insane. Here ya go.....

I visited Weta Workshop in February at the invitation of a person of great style and grace. They were working on a pretty severe deadline to make
several scenes ready for a March teaser trailer. I was
treated to the following scenes in various stages of prep:

Frodo and Gollum are fighting (presumably on the slope of Minas Morgul).

Gollum was acted for rotoscoping by a heavyset Kiwi gent. The animators were
having a bit of trouble making him thin, and texture maps were not complete,
so the evil one had fairly translucent features. Gollum is under Frodo, and
is biting his neck as Sam attempts to drag him off. Animators were having
the devil of a time elongating his feet and manipulating the shadows around
the pair, as background dirt and gravel had to be painted back in behind the
characters. Green blotchy skin, big eyes and hairy ears were dominant
characteristics. At this point, the studio had not converted day for night,
so this was a daylight scene I saw.

CG hordes are girding for the assault on Helm's Deep.

This was so exciting... The creatures are completely convincing as they
crawl around the bowl of the Deep. There are thousands of them. In one scene
we see Legolas and dozens of other warriors string and unleash a flurry of
arrows into the horde below. Cinema trickery: They goofed part of the shot,
and in the scene we saw, there is a bare second of speeded-up action (where
bad footage was cut) as the archers shoot. It goes by in a blur. We also saw
Riders from Rohan clash with Orcs in a night scene; backgrounds and CG
people were being painted in from blue screen. These are real horses riding
into real orc fighters.

Frodo and Sam climb up the mountain to Mordor.

We can plainly see where the compositors are drawing a rough line in the
print to drop in the matte painting of dark-skied Mordor. The actors had a
blue screen behind their heads (some yards away) so they could be eased into
the new scenery. They look weary.

Gollum finds the ring underwater.

An utterly real fish swims in front of a clothed CG Gollum as he swims under
the surface of the river Ithilien with the One Ring. Amazing water
effects...plants...ripples...light beams...beautiful. This is one of the
most finished scenes we saw.

Finally...the very coolest...Gandalf and the Balrog falling in the depths of
Moria.

The CG Gandalf, engulfed in flame, spiralling into a huge cavern
underground. Whoa. The only way to describe it is to picture pitch black,
with light appearing at the top of your view, brightening until flames and
the outlines of the characters explode out of a hole in the roof and drop,
slowly, until they are mirrored in a vast silent lake below, then - splash,
and contact with the water, geysering up and then darkness again. We also
say rough renderings of the fall from the sides, and, I seem to recall, some
swirling water effects. This was in rough stages, as they were plotting
textures and effects, so no smoke or atmosphere.

Last but not least, Treebeard.

This one's not going too swiftly for the animators. They've barely got a
look for the character: Square face, huge nose, tons of tendrils for the
beard. We saw a wireframe rendering; they haven't gotten to texture mapping
yet. The best feature for this character: great eyes with bushy brows.

Addendum: We saw some really cool props which the animators use to replicate
in their CG work: swords, armor, helmets, etc. There are machines and
workers flung all over the Weta building...it's a warren of dark alcoves,
workstations in hallways, and closets filled with designs. Unfortunately,
security was tight, so I didn't see the render-farm of PCs. The most
interesting aside: they proof their work in Netscape for Unix, and view
rendered output on Macintosh G4 towers. (Note: the software primarily used
to animate the LOTR films, Shake, has just been acquired by Apple
Computer.) Needless to say, we didn't bring any photos out. But you'll see
it all onscreen real soon now!

there&#39;s gonna be some good stuff here, just like Fellowship has some good stuff. but then there&#39;s gonna be some bad, bad stuff just like Fellowship has some bad, bad stuff. it will still be quite apparent that Jackson got his start in b-movies, that his style is still wrapped up in a certain b-movie mentality. there will probably be a moment that rivals the Galadriel freaking out scene in its absolute shittiness. and then changing the ending from that of the book, which has already been confirmed, is really gonna botch it up.

He won&#39;t be CG--that wouldn&#39;t make any sense, since Andy Serkis is supposed to be playing Smeagol in the flashback anyway... As for how Treebeard will look, if the Balrog is pretty plainly a John Howe Balrog (or an Alan Lee Balrog, can&#39;t remember which), chances are that Treebeard will be similar to illustrations by either of them.

...Is most likely from a flashback. Gollum was a hobbit at first, but he was in the "Gollum form" with the ring for hundreds of years. I really hope they are giving a detailed backstory for Gollum. It will take only a few minutes to tell it, but it&#39;s damn fascinating and gives his character more depth.

...It&#39;s always funny how people post on a thread to say that they are not interested about the topic, when the fact that they are posting about it tells that they ARE interested. If they wouldn&#39;t be intersted, they wouldn&#39;t bother to post either.

Mind you, I&#39;m not sure I want to know what is in this trailer. Oh, Gollum *must* work. He must! Oh, and saw Harry in London. He was quite articulate and personable - not entirely sure what I was expecting.

I believe Fran Walsh directed the scene you mentioned. I for one am glad they are showing us Gollum&#39;s history. It shows how the ring affects people long term. It&#39;s likely that this underwater swimming scene is Gollum heading under the Misty Mountains, rather than a river of Ithilien. Incidently there is a pic of Smeagol and Deagol fishing: http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/2/1000746417

PJ,
I understand leaving Shelob out of TTT, I really do. There&#39;s copious action in TTT with the other members of the fellowship, and Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Faramir is really about developing the relationships and seeing Frodo start to crumble. Whereas, in ROTK, after the escape from Cirith Ungol, mostly Frodo and Sam just do alot of trudging through Mordor - difficult to fill screen time with. So, fine, make that amazing encounter with Shelob the opening salvo in ROTK. I agree with the idea that this will make for better pacing. Just one plea. Give us a glimpse of Shelob in TTT. As a fanboy, that&#39;s all I need. I can&#39;t wait until 2003 to see Shelob. Throw us a bone in 2002. I don&#39;t care what the glimpse is. Gollum going to see her. Frodo and Sam peeking into Torech Ungol before beginning their journey into it and you sweep the camera in to give us a glimpse of what&#39;s waiting for them. That would be a great way to end TTT. Obviously, after having seen FOTR, you are simply the man, and most of us fanboys are willing to sit back and say, just do it your way. But as a favor to us...just a glimpse of Shelob. I gotta know what she&#39;s going to look like. Thank you.

Finished a film with Andy Serkis - he says that he&#39;s portraying Gollum, to begin with as a Hobbit with a heroin addiction, the adiction with take other his body and waste his bones and muscle with evil and in the process go from a cuddy hobbit (live action) to the cgi Gollum that we see in FoTR.

Sorry - my point was that he suggests that &#39;yes&#39; they have shot Gollum&#39;s backstory - doesn&#39;t mean that they will use it though, but Serkis did go back a month or so ago to loop some dialogue

Hmm... if memory serves, Gollum was a bit of a bastard from the get-go. His ownership of the Ring began in murder, so his case is only slightly analogous to Frodo&#39;s. Oh, and does anyone else hear Boromir make that "gollum" noise just after he&#39;s attacked Frodo and is lying there? It&#39;s quite subtle and yet cool.

I HATE coming to this site and seeing all the nose-picking DOLTS who sit around here and pretend to know anything about Tolkien. Two years ago you didn&#39;t know SQUAT about LOTR but now, since it&#39;s hip to like it, every backwards-cap wearing mallrat thinks they&#39;re a Tolkien scholar. Well, let me tell you something, YOU ALL SUCK and you don&#39;t know SHIT about Lord of the Rings, Tolkien or movies in general. This all site is made up of teat-suckling ASSMASTERS who lap at Harry&#39;s bung and slavishly follow whatever trends he&#39;s shilling for this week. What do you even care about the Two Towers trailer? Gandalf and the Balrog being in it? Hello, plant! Since Gandalf DIED in Fellowship, I think it stands to reason that you SHANT be seeing him again. Yeah, I know it&#39;s hard pretending to be a fan, isn&#39;t it? Well, why don&#39;t you lie down on you food-encrusted couch and watch "Glutton Bowl"? Then again, even that may be too intellectual for most of the feebs here.

The skies turn dark, there is a blue moon in the month, a cow bears a calf with two heads, someone says the word "Cockmaster" 5 times into a mirror, and behold! Dan_Caputi reappears like the perrenial rotted oaken thruppence. Obviously if you&#39;d read the article you&#39;d know that the scooper clearly mistook Gandalf for his evil twin brother Anarion. Sheesh. Don&#39;t come on here and act all superior again, or once again I will have to chastise you, like the ultimate Tolkien crack whore that I am.

We know that they have shot it (Fran Walsh directed it), but it&#39;s something that doesn&#39;t really move the story forward, so it might be one of the first things that will be cut away. Having said that, I&#39;m happy that PJ said they are really going to flesh out the relationship between Frodo and Gollum, and a small backstory in a form of montage would be great. PJ used around 6-7 minutes to tell the entire backstory for LOTR in the beginning of FOTR, so maybe a similar approach could work in the beginning of TTT? Galadriel narrating the story of Gollum in just a few minutes. In my opinion Gollum is just as important character as Frodo, so he SHOULD be explained in detail. Of course there are many ways to do it, a narrated backstory is not the only option.

OK folks listen up. First of all I&#39;m glad to see rotoscoping is back for "Two Towers". Hopefully it will be of the same high quality as Bakshi&#39;s masterpiece. Nothing like seeing a rotoscoped cartoon shift suddenly and disconcertingly into live action! Also, T2T? A simple TT has sufficed as an abbreviation for years. Why expend the effort typing 3 letters when you can just type 2 (also notice how I saved time and energy by not typing out the numbers "two" and "three" just then!). Finally, yes Gandalf died in "Fellowship," (or FOTR) so we won&#39;t be seeing him in TT (or T2T). Neither is it his twin Anarion. The Balrog falling into Moria scene described is surely a bit from the very exciting sequence in which the wizard Radagast wreaks vengeance upon the Balrog after Gandalf&#39;s untimely death. I can&#39;t wait to see the great "Wizard&#39;s Council" scene where Radagast, Allatar, and Pallando impale Aruman on a big spike outside the tower of Angband! sk

Why is it whenever I come to this site, I have to cross sabers with you, Alice, the den mother to these WHELPS? Can&#39;t you see that I am merely trying to school this rabble? Much like the way Gandalf teaches his new apprentice, Sting, how to wield the mighty sword of Anduin and destroy Theoden&#39;s evil army in "Return of the King." Of course, my efforts in this charge are forever thwarted by the likes of YOU, Alice, who has thrown in with the groudlings of AICN and spit in the face of Tolkien purists everywhere. There was a time, Alice, when I almost admired you. Now, my stomach turns at the mere site of your name. Don&#39;t castigate me for merely trying to elevate these mewling vermin to something beyond what they are. Especially when you&#39;ve become one of them.

What was Harry talking about when he mentioned the 29th? I thought all LOTR films are coming out before Christmas..like Fellowship...someone let me know...if if comes out after Christmas...i will not enjoy opening presents or family situations all day!!! I couldnt stand it!!
Lets hope Gollum looks a little more "lifelike" in TTT...not that he was bad in Fellowship...but...Im just being picky i guess...
I&#39;m off to make more candy...
WONKA

You would drive the 8 hours (or fly the 1 hour) to see "The Making of the Lord of the Rings", premiering next Monday at the Univ. of Oklahoma campus. It is the only place to see it until this coming November, unless of course it is shown at another college. But this one is guaranteed to have the director of it, Costas Botes there fresh from New Zealand in attendance for discussion. Tickets go up for grabs tomorrow morning. monsterofmud@removespamhotmail.com

Damn right HA-4! After all, let&#39;s remember Vlad as the man he was, fond of jamming 12 feet of timber up the arse of his political enemies. You can&#39;t make up stuff like that. I always larf at the story of the Turkish emissaries who got their hats nailed on to their heads. And of course, the slaughter of the Boyars. No wonder the peasants loved him, and still do. He&#39;s the father of the Wallachian tourist industry.

Elf Killer...
You love Star Wars.
I love Star Wars too. Most people love SW and are hoping the best for ATOC...but why can&#39;t LOTR rule as well? SW vs. LOTR is stupid..and you should not have brought it up. Lets all stop this innane tirade already...
Elf you will be in line to see 2 Towers and you know it...
And you are jealous cause i make candy for the JEDI...you do not..
HAAAAAAA!
back to work in the factory...
WONKA

Will certain talkbackers PLEASE stop complaining about every little change that PJ makes. This is HIS film, and he has been doing an amazing job! If he chooses to have Saruman killed, rather than turned into a weak, pathetic old man, then so be it--I&#39;m sure he and Fran have a good reason.
Also, I think that the Gollum backstory is extremely important, as Gollum will be a key figure in the next 2 films. We have to truly understand his journey before we can consider his actions in the next movies.
I&#39;m sure Treebeard will look fine by the time the film comes out. Let&#39;s not get all worked up over priliminary effects. And let&#39;s also not be too disappointed about Shelob. I think that PJ and Fran are very smart to keep her for the third film.
Thatisall.

It turns in fear, Dan_Caputi, it turns in fear and quaking. Tremble beneath my wrath in the same way that Smaug trembled beneath the wrath of Gorbudoc... well, that out of the way, it&#39;s so nice to see the usual crew here doing the usual stuff. Hokay, next question... when are we going to see pictures of this stuff?

I just hope, Satan (Lucas) releases the original version of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD. And not just the special edition. The Special Edition blew. There is nothing wrong with the original movies because they were full of action, adventure, great acting, and blah blah blah. Either way, LOTR is a far superior film trilogy than the new Star Wars films. Even though we only saw Episode I! Shit like that can&#39;t be made better.

Ha ha ha, we all have a lot of fun here. But in all seriousness, I&#39;d like to address the Smeagol issue. I believe that the origin of Gollum is imperative to the story, especially as it will be told in Jackson&#39;s film. It&#39;s my feeling that the origin scene will be played as a reveletory flashback, so that it comes as a shock to both Frodo and Sam and also to the audience (at least, the audience that hasn&#39;t read the book). Imagine the shock of finding that this pathetic wretch crawling filthily about was once a hobbit! Very dramatic. sk

NO candy for you!!
you get no candy at all...not even an everlasting gobstopper...you will see ATOC and you know it...
i love both franchises..
and episode 1 was not as good as it should have been..but i wouldnt say it is "shit"..go make a movie better than it before you rip it to shreds..

Actually, no. At least not unless I hear REALLY good things about it from people I trust. Actually, I&#39;ll probably have a bootleg days after release, if I enjoy that maybe I&#39;ll see it in the theatre. Believe it or not, there are people who are more excited about TTT than AotC.

And why is "In 5 Days George Lucas and ILM are going to sodomize us with 2 1/2 minutes of space fantasy." supposed to be a good thing? My a**hole is sore from Lucas&#39;s last space fantasy and I don&#39;t want to go through that again.

skarekroe... hmm. I never really got that Gollum *was* a hobbit, particularly - just something like a hobbit. But I could just be high on crack again - after all, it is a workday. I don&#39;t know if I agree that his origins are *necessary* - an awful lot has been said about the corrupting power of the Ring in the movies already - if you say he had it for 500 years and it did this to him, I don&#39;t think the audience would have a problem with that. I always thought that Gollum got what he deserved anyways - SPOILERS (sorta) he pretty much murders his best friend for the Ring in the space of one day, which, considering Bilbo had the damn thing for 60 years and the worst he could muster was a perpetual facelift and getting a bit of a &#39;tood on with Gandalf, is actually a pretty poor show. It&#39;s not like Smeagol started out all shiny and happy and Mission From God like Frodo does. I&#39;d be interested in seeing his backstory, obviously, but then I&#39;d sit through the movie if it were three days long, so maybe my opinions should be taken with a pinch of salt.

We saw in FOTR that his hand as it found the Ring was pure hobbit (as it should be). Why would a clothed, swimming Smeagol have to be CGed? (I&#39;m assuming it&#39;s the original finding of the Ring before any corruption takes place). Will it make the transition to Gollum more seamless if he&#39;s CG throughout? Wow, if the various stages of the corruption of Smeagol are going to be shown, instead of just a jump from Smeagol to Gollum, it&#39;s quite ambitious. (Of course, it should be Deagol finding the Ring, so this all may be moot....). ___________ BTW, New Line have indeed confirmed the trailer is to be pushed back to the 29th of March.

but even with a bootleg you will still *see* it...
Even if I did not go to the theater, i would see the DVD,,or on TV..you get my point..
I am sooo excited for TTT as well..I just dont understand why we cant hope for the best in BOTH cases..
LOTR and SW extremists are so embarrassing...why blast one to build up the other? Its pointless..
But alas, candy is never pointless.......WONKA

Now that the Subject heading has made me sound like a toothless, straw hat wearin&#39; wonder, at what point in the Second Book does this film end? (Look away now if you have no clue about the trilogy, please...) I SAID LOOK AWAY! Okay, I know I read that Shelob doesn&#39;t make an appearance until "Return", which kinda sucks but I can deal. However, what better cliffhanger could the movie have than what was presented in the book? Frodo and Friends arriving just outside of Mordor? Saruman reading about his possible fate on AICN? Legolas and Gimli next to each other, ready to pick off some orcs, only to freeze-frame with wah-guitar disco shit playing, while the credits appear Aaron Spelling-style? I don&#39;t mind deviations in these films, but I always thought the second act was supposed to have the big cliffhanger. And no Shelob pretty much shoots that. Or how about Legolas and Gimli leaning up against a wall in Helm&#39;s Deep, bobbing their heads around while Legolas freestyles such whitified hip-hop as "smokin&#39; weed, shootin&#39; Orcs, drinkin&#39; Ent drafts, schmokin&#39; weed, eatin&#39; lembas..." No? Yeah, you&#39;re probably right....

Pity the fools. Like Gollum, the SW fanboys cling to their precious kiddie toy franchise like we all know it&#39;s goin&#39; outta style. More&#39;s the pity, since they&#39;ve had to wait two decades for something even remotely half-decent. It&#39;s amusing. But at the end of the day, we know that LOTR fans will we proud of PJs accomplishment, and SW fans will be doing an agitated St Vitus dance pointing at the box office numbers and screaming, "LOOK! LOOK!!! Lucas sells more toys!!! Proves that LOTR sucks!!!!" Whatever.

A couple of people have implied that Shelob was not going to be in "The Two Towers." That would be too bad. Combined with the release of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" this could have been a Giant Spider Extravaganza Year!

Nothing improves a film more than the inclusion of a giant spider. You know, the whole time I was watching "A Beautiful Mind" I kept thinking, "What this movie really needs is for a giant spider to appear and eat Jennifer Connelly."

Yes, Alice, Smeagol was a hobbit, though he didn&#39;t come from the Shire and wouldn&#39;t have called himself a hobbit (For a mind-numbing amount of information on the subject I recommend checking the archives of alt.fan.tolkien or rec.arts.books.tolkien). I believe it&#39;s his very hobbitness that makes his origin so essential. We the audience identify more strongly with the averag-joe hobbits than we do with a bunch of elves, dwarves, and kings-in-exile. This will be played up in Frodo, who will see exactly what he could become if he lets the ring control him. sk

It&#39;s too expensive for me to call the States, even for a good laugh, but is this the thing on TORN where they used the Tolkien Sarcasm Page&#39;s summary yet again? That is funny. Actually, the Tolkien Sarcasm Page rules (the criticism of Bakshi&#39;s movie and the Tolkien trivia quiz are hilarious), and if you go to the page, there&#39;s an article there on how they stumped the Sunday Times, and it&#39;s hilarious.

Using an actor who is not proportionally correct for Motion Capture can cause problems with realism and accurate movement. Often this has to be compensated for by hand (though I am not sure exactly why the term &#39;rotoscoping&#39; was used). Take it from someone who has taped MC sensors on sweaty guys more than she cares to admit.

I worry about the look of the ents. As someone has said before, the ents storming Isengard could turn out to be one of the most bizarre spectacular scenes ever. Or it won&#39;t.
I&#39;ve heard Lucas has suggested that PJ make the ents living "christmas trees", complete with colored lights and ornaments, to get the kids really excited. Sorry, couldn&#39;t resist it. Hoping both movies rock.

...FIRE!!...we DON&#39;T sa-lute you. Anyways, I don&#39;t know about anyone else, but my issue with Shelob not being in the film is not being denied a giant spider, but the fact that the book&#39;s cliffhanger ending has to have Shelob to transpire. You can&#39;t have a half-dead (again!) Frodo captured and Sam left with the Ring if you don&#39;t have other events first. I mean, some editors are clever, but...and besides, I&#39;m a major Arachniphobe. P.S. Beetlejuice from Howard Stern as Smeagol in flashback sequence!

Yes, it&#39;s sad that the two franchises have been put against each other, but it&#39;s easy to see why. When I left my first showing of Episode 1, I spent the next day trying to convince myself I really liked it. When I left LOTR I was trying to convince myself it WASN&#39;T one of my favorite movies ever...and failing miserably. Those of us disgruntled with the direction of the Star Wars franchise simply found an outlet for our geekdom that didn&#39;t let us down. We weren&#39;t so quick to pepper King George with malice and hate before we had LOTR. Having something so quality that did not disappoint us just made the anger flow much more easily. Will I see AOTC? Yep. But if it&#39;s no good, I&#39;m not going to bother trying to convince myself it was...nor will I see it again. LOTR I&#39;ve rewarded with four viewings, and one more for the trailer is in order. Keep geeks happy, King George, and we&#39;ll shower you with our cash from our various IT and tech jobs that our geekiness earned. Scorn us, or act foolishly, and we take our cash elsewhere. Those who still defend Star Wars so vigorously protest too loudly, I think.

Dammit, I&#39;m putting in for an outer office with a window. Still, though, riddles. *** elanor: heard the "preview". BWAHAHAHA! Oh, dear. Now, Tolkien virgins&#39;ll be going into it thinking they&#39;ve heard a spoiler, big twist at the end with Gandy... Heh. *** Now &#39;en, this preview schtuff. Yep, the 29th, with New Line doing a big rerelease effort for the 22nd, get it back into 2,000 theaters before the ree-swap: http://www.hollywood.com/news/detail/article/1105734/page/3 Frankly I think it&#39;s going to kick arses up and down the aisles. And PJ wouldn&#39;t release it without finished FX. Is the report up there dated? *** SSSSPOOOOIILEEEERS spoilers spoilers spoilers. As for how T2T will end now, without Shelob and the book&#39;s cliffhanger, here&#39;s my humble guesswork. It&#39;s going to be setting up for the full-on War of the Ring in ROTK. Throwdown of Saruman, Pippin grabs palantir, looks in it and goes haywire. Gandalf scoops him up, gives "orders" to Theoden (and palantir to Aragorn), speeds off on Shadowfax with Pip. Some triumphal talk of the Muster of Rohan to commence, riders set out with fanfare-type score. Cut back to Frodo et al. Sky darkens, clouds billowing out of Mordor blocking the sky. Gollum&#39;s led them to foot of the mountains, right by the gates of Minas Morgul. As they begin to struggle up the stair, the gates open below them, and the army marches out. Witch-king/Frodo weirdness, passes. Endless army, marching out at constant pace. Finally, Gollum drags hobbits up stairs, army still flowing out, stretching from the Gates to the blackened horizon... fade out. *** You all realize of course, that this bit of speculation was entirely for my sake, not yours. A form of therapy, as it were, until THE FRIGGING 29TH GETS HERE GAWD it&#39;s takin for damn ever pant pant pant and then the wait until August, of course, then November, then December 18th.... then late March again, then August, then November....

Actually, some films should have aimed a little lower. "Ator the Fighting Eagle" starring Miles O&#39;Keeffe, features the worst giant spider in cinema ever, being composed mostly of a mass of pipe cleaners shot close-up. Actually its the high point of the film, a genre classic.

...to want to eat Jennifer Conn--[SMACK] Ow! *** My favorite bit on the Tolkien Sarcasm site is the original movie version of Lord of the Rings--yes, before Bakshi! In glorious Quicktime, about 9 minutes long. Directed by Howard Hawks, starring Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, "Play-It-Again" Sam...

Trailers - yes, the TTT stuff isn&#39;t till the 29th now - and if you&#39;re freaking because you don&#39;t think the movie will still be in the cinemas still, you&#39;re not alone, brothers. skarekroe - hmm. Well, I get the impression that the Gollum stuff is getting built up (nowt wrong with that, Gollum rules) in the forthcoming release. jollydwarf - I&#39;m in complete agreement about the fantastic cliffhanger in the books - that said, I always thought Frodo&#39;s scene at the Ford was the best bit in the first book, and I lost that too! Downer, but thankfully the rest made up for it. Pallando - well you can eat Jennifer Connelly if you want. I won&#39;t stand in your way. I can&#39;t imagine how TTT will end, to be honest, but I&#39;m betting it will be after a battle, presumably Helms Deep. And that little movie is way cool, isn&#39;t it? "If only I could... forget." I still love the trivia quiz though, gotta say.

You&#39;re such a coy little bitch. Of course you&#39;ll see TTT. You *love* it like you loved the last one. In fact, you love *us*, and the whole world can *see* it. You do nothing but hang with us all day long, in between stints of trying to get your beloved Harry to notice you in your unbearable loneliness and unrequited passion. I guess that&#39;s okay. I suppose it keeps you off the streets.

Any of you out there who are Purdue students, and would like to see your views in print form of the school paper, e-mail me at scarffy77@aol.com. And The Two Towers will only rock if they get Treebeard and gollum done right.

Harry! Please write up a detailed description about your trip to England. We want to read all about what you got up to. Your other quick report about the signing left me wanting more! Please Harry, write a big report on it! PLEASE!!!! Does anyone else wanna see this???? Thanks HArry!!

I mean, lookit the li&#39;l elfkiller, he&#39;s just soooooo cute! We promise to laugh at him, and toss food to him, and never clean his cage, and ignore him til he screams, and walkies... So? can we have just this one LOTR talkback pet, pleeeeeeze? *** I&#39;m a lot less worried about FOTR leaving theaters than I was before I read that link I posted up there. New Line&#39;s going to do a big push to get it back in theaters the 22nd. And with the promise of a new reel and so new business, I&#39;m sure there&#39;s going to be theaters wanting to clear out dead space in 2-3 weeks. (How much repeat business is Big Fat Liar really getting?) But man, until I read that I was gearing up to call and write to cinema managers, telling em "You DO know they&#39;re sending out a Towers preview, right? Keep the movie!!" Now, though, looks like New Line&#39;s going to be doing the work for me. (About time!) *** Now then, saw We Were Soldiers. What the hell was a giant spider doing in the Ia Drang Valley? Still, cool battle. Big sucker, hairy.

hey guys. I was reading your comments and realise some of you have been here for a while, so forgive me for not knowing whatever "rules" you guys might have about whatever. I don&#39;t know. ANYWAY....as an avid Tolkien fan (and I mean that. I&#39;ll tell you about Turin Turambar, Beleriand, whatever) I am sitting on my hands waiting for TT. However, it really pisses me off that some of my favorite reading from the book won&#39;t be in the movie, but that&#39;s the way it is in every book to movie transition. The first one left out some HUGE passages (Tom Bombadil?) and I&#39;m sure TT will too. But leaving out shelob? How else will the ring come to Sam when Frodo is captured? *my scenario (spoilers) I suppose they save her for ROTK and have from shelob&#39;s lair to many partings (read the books :P as that movie, and aparently they leave out the scouring of the shire, which puts Grima killing Saruman when they are called out of Isengard. Odd changes, but it should all work out. I&#39;m looking forward to Helm&#39;s Deep and the Dead Marshes as the stand out scenes in TT. What about you guys? Return of Gandalf, maybe?

Fear not he actaully looks like a living tree, no square face
I have seen treebeard that will be used in the movies. I have visited WETA digital b4 the LOTR came out and My benefactor had a statue of Treebeard as a point of reference for his job.

Heh, I&#39;m just being a prick, Vanisher. That sucks it&#39;s not local for you anymore. But that COULD change! Maybe you didn&#39;t read the whole link, esp. where he sez "On Mar. 22 we&#39;re going to do a big push to get back into the theaters. I hope to get back to (around) 2,000. So we&#39;ll get ourselves through [Oscar] weekend." They&#39;re working up a big fat rerelease, and I&#39;d say they have the asses-in-seats clout to pull it off. And 2,000 is decidedly NOT a dozen theaters nationwide. So hold out hope! You may only have to drive 50 miles! ;-) I&#39;m optimistic for ya.

Goddamn you people! Pay attention!! Now,I don&#39;t normally argue stupid points like this, but in this case you have to be corrected. When they showed a close up of Gollum&#39;s eyes, he was in the dark and the ring was near. So of course they&#39;re going to be large. They&#39;re exactly as Tolkien described his eyes in the dark, big and pale, almost like lamps. Not only that but they were totally believable looking eyes. The best CG eyes I&#39;ve ever seen. I&#39;m sure when they show Gollum in day light, his eyes will be small and squinted.

Coming to this site and LAUGHING at all the sniveling worms that slink about it! You&#39;re all such big Tolkien scholars, aren&#39;t you? Where were you in 1999? Oh, that&#39;s right, you were cooing contentedly as Lucas spoon-fed you another dollop of that candy-coated SLOP that he dares to call a movie series. But now that the whole world has gone slap-happy over Tolkien, you&#39;ve all slithered on your pasty-white bellies right up to the Hollywood trough and said, "Give me more, Mommy! I don&#39;t know what it is, but if everyone likes it so must I!" You make every fiber of my being crawl with sickness. And YOU, Alice, you&#39;re the mangiest cur of the lot. You know your stuff, I grant you, but yet you choose to use this knowledge to chatter away at the monkey house with the rest of the APES. Much as Mithrandir the White&#39;s heart breaks at the treachery of Radagast the Green at the Grey Havens...so does mine.

morGoth - he&#39;s our own conflicted tormented creature, and not responsible really for anything he does or writes. He&#39;s just been corrupted by endless proximity to LOTR talkbacks. Let pity stay your hand. At least from killing him. I guess it would be okay to throw rocks at him, though.

Ents! Ents! They&#39;re the whole ballgame boys and girls. Get Treebeard and co. wrong and movie fails. Entish wonder and mystery drive the story along and at key points (Helms Deep, Isengard) they ARE the story. Without them--believable them--the thing will just crash in a campy heap. I keep having to fight off visions of the big, giant surly carrot from the old Lost in Space eppy. I say, if in doubt, shoot Treebeard like Brando in Apocalypse Now. Try to make less seem like more. Anything, just don&#39;t junk up the screen with HR Puffinstuf rejects.

Listen, we&#39;re all about to pee in our pants in anticipation for TTT, and don&#39;t you know we&#39;ll be doing the same for RoTK (if you&#39;re not already). Remember, Tolkien didn&#39;t divide the books intentionally. Tolkien intended the Shelob thing to be resolved with the turn of a page, but those publishers decided it would be a good idea to end each segment with a cliffhanger so people would buy the next one. Thing is, no one&#39;s worried about RoTK performing in the box office. It won&#39;t matter which chapter Jackson leaves off with, and I&#39;m not complaining, because if it were too much of a cliffhanger, I&#39;d likely die of anticipation of the glorious finale.

BLA HA HA HA HA! Pulled this offa IMDB.com: **** Crowe Furious As Poem Again Misses The TV Cut: Annoyed Russell Crowe threw a party so friends could finally hear his BAFTA poem broadcast on Australian television - only for it to be cut again. The astonished star, who went berserk when the poem was edited out of the British TV coverage of the awards in Britain, had been promised his Best Actor speech would be screened in full during the Australian broadcast. So he invited pals to hear at his farm near Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. But once again, the footage of his poem was missing from the final cut. According to British newspaper The Sun, a source says, "The party came to an abrupt halt. Russell couldn&#39;t believe the poem was axed again. He went sulky at first, then got angry." Crowe, 37, who won the BAFTA for his role in A Beautiful Mind, pinned TV executive Malcolm Gerrie to a wall after the poem was cut from the British Broadcasting Corporation&#39;s transmission. Malcolm says, "There were specific instructions Russell&#39;s poem would not be edited out of the Australian broadcast." But a spokesperson for ABC television in Australia says, "I don&#39;t know if it was cut out at this end or before it left Britain, but it was not in." *** HA HA HA HA HA HA...! Oh, oh dear, gotta catch my breath, wipe the tears... I love ya, Russell, but good gravy... ooh hoo hoooo... *** Okay, I&#39;ll make the post Oscar-related. Is he screwing over his and/or ABM&#39;s chances?

I dont hate elfkiller because he fans the flames of hate in the SW/LOTR&#39;s war. As I&#39;ve stated before, thats why I come to these threads. I hate him because he constantly talks like he&#39;s a gagsta when its obviuos he&#39;s a surburban white boy PUSSY who listens to too much eminem. Why don&#39;t you come to my neighborhood and talk that shit, homeboy? I live in Koreatown, L.A. The asian gangs will kill you so fast, you&#39;ll be dead before you hit the ground. Rag on LOTR all you want, just dont try to convince me your a gang banger, you WUSS.

*sigh*! i`d like reading ttt again for abbreviating the waiting time..i`m afraid though because it could ruin my film experience---all this stuff sounds great and it SEEMS to have this thrilling and exciting lord of the rings spirit deep within (as well as the fellowship motion picture)...*sigh*

Let&#39;s be honest - you haven&#39;t had any hope for this franchise at any point, ever. So don&#39;t pretend that this report makes any difference to you. You&#39;re an LOTR naysayer, have been in virtually every talkback you&#39;ve appeared in. That&#39;s fine. Just don&#39;t act as though it is really this report that is causing you to lose hope. You WANT it to fail, for whatever reason.

You must have totally forgotten the part in the Two Towers where Rainbow Gandalf kills the Teletubbies in their little Hobbit Hole while they were sleeping and takes over PBS children&#39;s programming.

If there ever was an obvious attempt to troll away inconspicuously it is this and I can&#39;t believe you are all responding to him/her. The SW - LotR bashing is silly and everyone from Peter Jackson and Christopher Lee are sick, sick SICK of it! They sound bored and tart every time they get asked about it. Big surprise but I think you&#39;ll find that most SW fans also loved LotR and vice versa. I pity elfkiller. Trolling is a cry for attention born from the socially outcast. They&#39;ve been abused so much in the real world they are forced to turn to the anonimity of the internet to unleash their repressed anger. Poor fools. I pity them.

ANOTHER REMAKE NIGHTMARE - Apparently the REAL &#39;Billy Jack&#39; is thinking of remaking &#39;Billy Jack&#39; using Keanu Reeves. Now, I thought the other remake stories this week were bad, now Hell has REALLY turned into the next site of the Winter Olympics. (Don&#39;t believe me? Check the newswires, Reuters, Yahoo News, etc.)

Besides Gandalf&#39;s Ghost scouring the Shire before being stopped by Balin and Luthien (which will be KILLER if the CG is done just right--imagine the gleaming Silmarillion in Balin&#39;s Artificial Hand) it&#39;s the CRUCIAL scene as Elrond, possessed by Morgoth&#39;s resurrected spirit, catches up with Frodo in one of the caverns in Mordor. --------------ELROND: "You hear that, Mr. Baggins? That is the sound of Elvin-ability. That is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Baggins." Frodo begins to glow, as the theme song to The Last Dragon blares in the background....FRODO: "My name....is FRODO!!"---------shicka boom shicka boom

Another &#39;LotR&#39;/&#39;AotC&#39; talkback. There really is no place like home. Shall I start shit with the Tolkien/Jackson camp? No, I shant as I am far too much of a gentleman. In fact I&#39;ll even wish you luck at the oscars, since I don&#39;t care about &#39;A Beautiful Mind&#39; and I don&#39;t think the other Best Picture nominees stand a chance. I wish myself two and a half minutes of goodness on March 10, and two and a half hours of goodness May 16. Alice, morGoth, elanor, I wish you three and a half minutes of goodness on March 29, and three and a half hours of goodness on December 18. I&#39;ll see &#39;The Two Towers&#39; as well, and I hope that I won&#39;t spend the whole movie thinking about cigarettes. I long for the day when hobbits and clones hold hands across America. To those who insist that Fincher, Nolan and Soderbergh are good filmmakers, I hope that their new works will dazzle and delight. I hope that Tom Cruise will continue his super cool movie streak with &#39;Minority Report&#39;. I hope that &#39;Spider Man&#39; will be the first Sam Raimi movie with a coherent narrative, and that Kirsten Dunst will overshadow Gwyneth, Cameron and Julia, all of whom she can out act. I also hope that Dunst will make her next movie in Vancouver and become my bride. I hope that &#39;Gangs of New York&#39; is a return to form for Scorsese. I hope that &#39;The Scorpion King&#39; and &#39;Scooby Doo&#39; will put an end to several unnecesarry careers. I hope that Moriarity gets a heart, that Harry gets his courage (he really is a dead ringer for the cowardly lion), and that elfkiller8 gets a brain. I hope that Ridley Scott makes &#39;Perfume&#39;, and makes it quickly because it&#39;s imperative that Scott make more movies than Spielberg or Soderbergh. I hope that Winona Ryder continues her long, public, and very entertaining descent into madness. I hope that Stanley Kubrick faked his death, and has actually been making &#39;Napoleon&#39; in secret. I hope that a deserving film wins next years academy award. I hope that I&#39;m a stinking rich producer by the time &#39;Episode III&#39; comes out. I hope we all find true love and happiness and rocking good times at the movies.

The Susskind novel of the same name? Hold the presses! How did I miss that? I&#39;m slipping. Damn_Caputi, you sad, sad little man. In case you haven&#39;t noticed, you are also a resident in the Monkey House... in the same way that the orcs of Aman overwhelm the Fellowship at the Bay of Morwen, and the bullies of your high school overwhelm you every recess and stick your head down the toilets and flush it, so you are overwhelmed by the standard issue AICN LOTR talkback. And that girl you make eyes at in your English class, and compose poems in elvish about that you don&#39;t dare show her? She doesn&#39;t like you back. She told me.

Which is why it is resolved about 100 pages into RotK! Shelob BELONGS in TTT, it is the absolute perfect ending, it is the second greatest ending to anything in history - second only to The Grey Havens. You all may have a hardon for PJ because he nailed FotR, and I loved that movie, but this just is not right. It ruins the emotional resonance of TTT and the most important of all being the ascension of Samwise beginning to happen in this movie. With Shelob in RotK his character only takes a major hand in things in the third chapter, which is not what Tolkien intended in the slightest.

They&#39;re ALL OVER this site. Boot-licking, marrow-sucking fiends who slavishly follow whatever trend is hip at the time. Hell, if Carrot Top made a movie with wire-fu and lightsabers all the mongoloids here would fill up their rubber pants with joy. Especially if AICN endorsed the movie! Yes, all of you are SUCH big LOTR fans. Well, soon enough Lucas will present you with the second meaty teat that dangles from that pig&#39;s belly of a movie series and you&#39;ll worm your way through the DUNG and lap away squealing, "More, mama, give more!" And, once it&#39;s no longer en vogue to like Star Wars, you&#39;ll tie on the LOTR feedbag for a second helping. SHEEP, LEMMINGS, VERMIN. Take your pick, people. They all apply.

Elfkiller, please, please try to keep up. I know it&#39;s difficult but I have faith you can do it. The movie you are referring to is "Attack of the Clones" - the new SW movie. AOTC. Though you may also be looking forward to ATOC - "Ass-fancying Troll on Crack", which I understand to be the name of your autobiography.

Uh, I could care less what any of you 15-year-old basement dwelling virgins think. What I want to know is how in the hell a review of a movie trailer that is almost a year away warrants a long awaited script review from Moriarty that discusses a movie that has received scant attention from this movie site which is brought to you by the good people at New Line. Go stroke yourself with your Legolas action figure bitch. No body is talking to you.

I was at the Q&A in NYC. Peter Jackson specifically said the 22nd and now his Hobbit ass is holding it til (you see that one L!) the 29th! That shit ain&#39;t right, to hype it up and let people like me wait for another week! So if anyone have a bootleg copy, put that shit up!

My prayers have been answered!! Gandalf and the Balrog are in. &#39;Far under the Earth we fought&#39; and all that!!! Not too bothered about Jackson putting Shelob in RotK - theres plenty of action to be getting on with and it should be a killer opener for no.3. Although come to think about it, I suspect RotK is now going to be about 1/2 hour Shelob, 1/2 hour goodbyes and 2hrs all out battle!!! (with Frodo and Sam interspersed I should imagine). Can&#39;t Wait for LOTR: Return on the Eight-Legged Freaks.

I didn&#39;t pretend to be a LOTR fan at all, I just said I didn&#39;t think the visual effects would look too good, all right? If I were trying to pull what you accused me of, I would compliment the visual effects, OK? Man...

OMG lol! omg so sad. Can&#39;t wait to see blockhead treebeard and fatass gollum, omg lol, so sad. LOTR fx were laughable...lol, so laughable, I can&#39;t wait to see the demon from spawn a second time or bilbows and gladreels lame cgi freakouts...lol omg so sad. They will probably model shellob on that lame spider from Dr.No. Omg that would be so sad, lol!

I know, it does suck. But it&#39;s not there. Hopes were raised breifly a while back when it was implied that Saruman may die in the third movie, but I believe they have categorically come to nothing. Bah. But I guess it&#39;s swings and roundabouts. Scouring gets cut, but, happily, so does Tom Bombadil. They did get a petition up about Arwen, I remember, not sure what came of that. I don&#39;t think she did that badly, but it did screw up my favourite scene in the first book. It&#39;s not like you&#39;re going to like everything they do, but ultimately, it is their party. And we vote with our wallets.

I agree with the person above who said that ths Scouring is the whole point of the trilogy. The Scouring really is one of the most important parts of LOTR. I think Tom Bombadil is, too.
Those are two MAJOR elements missing from the movies. I am a little disappointed that PJ seems to be cutting out anything that isn&#39;t related to battles/fight scenes.
This is LOTR, not Mortal Kombat. If he really wanted to, PJ could have found room for Bombadil. I&#39;m very disappointed that he chose to cut out these two major scenes.
But, it&#39;s his choice. We can either take it or leave it, I suppose.

This is actually very interesting, cos I was discussing this in the pub on Friday. The consensus seemed to be "Thank God he&#39;s gone." But I know that this is by no means a global sentiment. The Scouring is, to me, ultimately, the final battle in the quest and I think its indispensible, but I never thought that about Tom because he doesn&#39;t move the action forward any, and I personally find him so damn twee. Of course there is a downside to removing him in that we then don&#39;t get the Barrow Downs, which to me were one of the creepiest parts in all three books. Even creepier than the Dead Marshes, though not as creepy as Shelob&#39;s Lair, or as creepy as the change that comes over Frodo in Cirith Ungol in the tower. Also, when removing Tom, the prescient dreams that the hobbits have get cut, which is a shame as they are rather nice. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I was listening to my walkman when I sat down in the movie theatre the other day just as the trailers ended. I discovered that if you listen to Pink Floyd&#39;s album The Dark Side Of The Moon while watching The Fellowship of the Rings, some truly bizzare coincidences occur!
Setup: Put the album in your CD walkman & start it right as the New Line logo comes onscreen. Rinse, lather, and repeat when it runs out...
Here&#39;s a list of things to look for, in order:
1) "Balanced on the biggest wave" - A little hobbit child is balancing on a fence, as Gandalf and Frodo ride up in the wagon.
2) During "Time," Frodo is chased by the Black Rider to the line: "no one told you when to run."
3) In Bree Frodo and his friends are trying to decide what to do, on the lyric "waiting for someone or something to show you the way" Aragorn is shown.
4) When Frodo in Rivendell wants to go back to Bag End, the album is playing: "home, home again."
5) Gandalf is on the top of Isengard with Saruman just as the band sings: "Don&#39;t give me that do goody goody bull - ---t." As Gandalf confronts Saruman the band sings, "And who knows which is which" (or is that "witch is witch" or "wizard is wizard"?).
6) "Up (up up up)" - Saruman raises his staff and Gandalf is held over the edge of Isengard - "and Down (down down down)" - Saruman brings Gandalf crashing back to the floor at his feet.
7) "Haven&#39;t you heard, it&#39;s a battle of words" - Saruman is trying to bury the Fellowship at Caradhras and Gandalf is fighting back with incantations.
8) "Got to keep those loonies on the path" - Aragorn tries to get the Fellowship going again after they leave the mines.
9) "See you on the dark side of the moon" Frodo and Sam start down the road to Mordor.
10) The song "Brain Damage" is a reference to Peter Jackson&#39;s splatter film "Bad Taste".
11) The song title "Money" is a reference to Peter Jackson&#39;s new nickname, given to him by New Line execs.
But it&#39;s not just the weird lyrical coincidences. Songs end when scenes switch, and even the Orc&#39;s marching is perfectly choreographed to the song "Us and Them."
The phenomenon is at its most startling during the Mines of Moria scene, when the wordless singing in "The Great Gig in the Sky" swells and recedes in strikingly perfect time with the action.

I am as big a fan of SW as anyone here (though maybe I don&#39;t spend as much TIME being a fan as some of you). I grew up on it, it&#39;s almost as big a part of my childhood as my family is, and I&#39;m eagerly awaiting the new flick, and, if this one&#39;s good, the third.
HOWEVER, I can acknowledge flaws in my beloved films, just as I can acknowledge them in the people about whom I care deeply. The people who&#39;ve decided that LotR is the enemy are an embarrassment to all cinema fans. As a matter of fact, Fellowship is a better made movie than any SW we&#39;ve seen so far. Personally, I hope the remaining chapters in both trilogies produce a four-way tie for greatest movie ever. As is, PJ is 1-for-1. Fellowship had more action, more plot, and a hell of a lot more emotion than SW. Lucas is about 2.5-for-4, good numbers, and I still love the series as much as ever. But these were never artistic masterpieces or anything, just incredible watches.
I can understand my fellow SW fans&#39; anger. Ever since Phantom Menace, they&#39;ve had mountains of ridicule heaped upon them. To those who&#39;ve stuck through it, kudos. I&#39;m completely with you in keeping the faith for Eps II & III. But enough with the verbal abuse! Two spectacular "fantasy" epics can coexist.

because the next two months are gonna be all about AOTC. The posters coming out this week, then on Sun., the two and a half minute trailer....then we&#39;re gonna be swimming in SW. Although the trailer for TTT will be cool, its coming out right as Ep.II&#39;s marketing campaign starts....oh and did i mention the best part of SW? THE TOYS!!! April 23rd baby!!

Nothing like getting to a message thread late and having to wade through miles of posts (fortunately I can skip about half of them, ty elfkiller, etc...). We&#39;re on to Bombadil now, who would be out of place in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I found Old Man Willow kind of interesting, not evil exactly, but dangerous and with personality, like a misbehaving animal that Bombadil can scold. "Drop that Hobbit!! Bad Tree!! Giiive. There&#39;s a good tree." I heard Arwen will appear in TTT. What will the poor girl do with herself? As far as I can remember, she pops up in ROTK and marries Aragorn. Doesn&#39;t she spend all of TTT holed up in Rivendell knitting that flag or banner or standard? Will the flag knitting be shown in flashback in ROTK (where Tolkein put it) or in chronological order? In TTT where it belongs!! O.K., that probably won&#39;t start any new interesting chain of debate, so here&#39;s something else... A Beautiful Mind could have easily have included giant spiders if only, oh, wait hang on a minute, guess I should do this first *SPOILER WARNING***, if only they&#39;d picked different hallucinations for Nash. Apparently in real life his hallucinations involved monsters and extraterrestrials, so giant spiders would&#39;ve been perfect. Would&#39;ve been a different movie though I guess. CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER:"That Giant Spider he&#39;s always talking about, the one he roomed with in College, have you ever met it? Ever spoke to it on the phone?" JENNIFER CONNELLY:"Well no, but?..." PLUMMER:"Ever seen a picture of John and the Giant Spider together?" CONNELLY: "I don&#39;t think..." PLUMMER: "No, of course not. Alice, the Giant Spider was another hallucination." CONNELLY:"Noooo (turns away and weeps)" Academy awards all around! I think Gosford Park portrayed the upper class Giant Spider hunt with Altman&#39;s piquancy and incisive satire, offering a level-eyed, yet twinkle eyed look at this bygone era. And wasn&#39;t it hilarious when Stephen Fry&#39;s assistant kept trying to draw his attention to the Giant Spider in the secret passage. Don&#39;t worry, with all this and EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS this&#39;ll still be the year of the giant spiders.

Nazzim O&#39;Bazzim, don&#39;t forget that this is also the year of Sam Raimi&#39;s Giant Spiderman, and Val Kilmer will be fighting Giant Spiders in the Salton Sea, which is of course a remake of Breakfast At Tiffany&#39;s.

I can&#39;t believe this always turns into a war between Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings... Are people really that fuckin&#39; hard up that they can&#39;t afford to see, and enjoy both films for the cracking entertainment that they are...
Jesus, how long before the X-Box vs Gamecube vs PS2 argument finds its way into Lord Of The Rings or AOTC talkback? It&#39;s only a matter of time, surely...
In protest, I&#39;m going to break all the rules of talkback and blatantly plug my favourite new comedy band&#39;s records...
www.mp3.com.au/thevintagechimps
Listen to Deck The Ho, laugh, and enjoy LOTR and AOTC... There&#39;s room for both, honestly!!!

Ebonic, I&#39;m crying with laughter here. How the devil are you? Indeed, you have also successfully named the one film not improved by the presence of a giant spider... or have you? Consider that yes, Wild Wild West was shit, but how much shittier would it have been without the spider? And anyway, the spider was mechanical, which could technically mean a disqualification.

...taking a leak on FOTR&#39;s special effects or other Oscar nominations? They sound like a bunch of whiney little panty waists: "Wahen! I know the whole world is against me on this, but I know my opinion about special effects is the only one that really matters anyway! Waahaaa! why can&#39;t everyone see what a piece of shit this film is? As is so plain to meeee?! boo hoo! I HAVE to be right! Someone PLeeease listen to me!" Shut the the fuck up. If I said it was light you&#39;d say it was dark. Pathetic bunch of wankers. "Every critic is full of shit and the movie going public must be a bunch of brainwashed zombies to send the worldwide boxoffice on this tripe film to $752 million world wide..." Can it you dopes! Can you say: Ostrich? an you say: Moron? (with a capital Mmmmmmooooaaaters!!!! er.. um, MO-ron... heh..)Can you say: head up your ass? These films are "an event socialogique". A fine pouch a Ol&#39; Toby to the Tolkien weenie (or other denizen, as it ain&#39;t a Tolkien related trivia question) what can name the film and the actor this quote comes from... Hmmm? Sweet old Toby... ahhh, go on wank off ye spoilsport whining gash losers! Arrivederci mi paisanos! Namarie, Trubba not, kick the spoilsports int the CROT-ch, Skyway MMMMMMooooooaaaaaters OUT! you jag-offs... {;-0

...if I&#39;d never been introduced to the giant spider that my husband roomed with at college. I&#39;d think that maybe he and the spider were having some kind of thing together. But then I am the jealous type.

Simultaneous posting by ebonic! Nifty. Yeah, I was trying to puzzle over how it was a response to mine...It looked like one. Question now: Other than Wild Wild West, (which may not count, mechanical etc...) are there any other giant spider movies which are not ALL ABOUT Giant Spiders? (ie: TARANTULA, and other movies that you can&#39;t remove the spiders from ) Right now I can only think of Krull, which had some kind of fairly largish spider interlude that didn&#39;t need to be there at all. ( Episodic quest type movie too, kind of hard to say exactly what the best bits of Krull were...what episodes were the keepers? Richard Moll with one eye? Liam Neeson in a supporting role? I got a friend named Torquil who likes the movie just because there&#39;s a Torquil in it.)

I noticed you put quotation marks over that example of what you thought was "whiny panty wastes" being immature about LOTR. I, however, would put quotation marks over that entire post, because what you just said was powerfully immature. We&#39;re not trying to make anybody agree with us, and we don&#39;t care if anybody listens to us, we&#39;re just stating our opinion. We&#39;re kinda tired of people worshiping LOTR every damn post and we think we&#39;re entitled to a different opinion. If you disagree, I find that powerfully sad, and I can just picture you throwing a tantrum, gunning down the ushers, and running into the theatre when you don&#39;t have enough money to buy a ticket to The Two Towers.

Bizarrely enough, there is a random giant spider moment in "Meet the Feebles", giant spider incidents in "The Hobbit" (and of course there will almost definitely be a Giant Spider Incident in ROTK). There are also some spider incidents in "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (one of my favourite horror movies ever) where the spider in question is not necessarily giant on an ordinary scale, but certainly way too large for me to feel entirely comfortable with it. And there is a very nasty spider that lives in my Dad&#39;s barn. It could pull a cart, if you could get close enough to put a harness on it.

You completely missed my point. But I suppose that comes with the territory. I didn&#39;t say you were pretending to be a LOTR fan. I&#39;m saying that you showed up here acting as though you have lost hope in TTT because of this report, which is obviously BS. They could come on here and say the CGI is just about complete and looks like the greatest thing ever, and you&#39;d still find some way to put it down.

Or whatever the hell you guys are calling the next STAR WARS segment. (I thought it was ATTACK OF THE CLONES myself). The last one stank up the big screen pretty badly. Do you really think the next one will be an improvement? Of course, the followup to the very first STAR WARS turned out to be a masterpiece. So who knows? I wouldn&#39;t get my hopes up until I see the thing. Same deal with TT. FOTR was okay, a three-star effort, but certainly not great, and it played like a very expensive B movie. But who knows? Maybe TT will improve on the first. Let&#39;s just hope they keep the CGI to a minimum. (Fat chance of that, of course!)

Now there&#39;s a powerful book-to-screen parallel to mull over. (Or many it was one of the other Oz books, going to have to ponder that one) So, what you need for a classic fantasy is spiders larger than normal size and humans smaller than normal size, be they Munchins, hobbits, or girls from Kansas. Don&#39;t remember the giant spider in Meet the Feebles, but I&#39;ll take your word for it. Must&#39;ve been the kind of random thing I&#39;m thinking of. If I can&#39;t remember the giant spider, it can&#39;t have affected the movie much. A hippo with a machine gun, now THAT was scary.

Anyone see the film version of "It"? The giant spider ending sequence, as described in Stephen King&#39;s book was pretty much unfilmable. As the film proved. It was good to see Jon-boy Walton still getting work though.... Speaking of unfilmable endings, Ridely Scott is doing Perfume? NOOOOOOOOOO! I mean I like Scott and all, and this is just my personal opinion, but ...... NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! How is Pefume ever a Hollywood film? (Though it made a pretty good Nirvana song, didn&#39;t it?) _____ Anyway, what&#39;s the topic again? LOTR trolls, wasn&#39;t it? Pathetic showing, really, boys. Here&#39;s some ammo for yer: LOTR opened in Japan. New Line were expecting a $10 mil opening, and it only pulled in 6.8 (against Monsters Inc though, mind). Will it go down well in the far east? Tolkien is not well known there, and his mythic archetypes are perhaps too rooted in European culture to be fully appreciated (eg, there are no dwarves in Japanese folklore. So they probably wonder who the hell the short bearded guy is...). Maybe New Line just left it too long after the hype died down? ______ BTW, the Scouring of the Shire isn&#39;t "the whole point" of LOTR, or at least it isn&#39;t for most people. If it wasn&#39;t in the book, would the book then become "pointless"? Hardly. Scouring is an important element, amongst many others. I hope that, as suggested, in PJ&#39;s RoTK the hobbits return home and find it changed, as they themselves are changed. A peasants&#39; uprising and battle isn&#39;t strictly necessary to convey _some_ of the point, at least.

Stephen King&#39;s IT had a huge spider at the end, and the movie certainly didnt revolve around that one animal. Actually, I hate the ending with that damn spider, we watch the whole movie as a clown being the villain then he morphs into a spider in the end, damn.

I admit it. I made several mistakes, like yes, Shake is the compositing tool they use, Gollum probably isn&#39;t swimming in the Ithilien, and I don&#39;t know for sure that Frodo and Gollum are fighting near Minas Morgul (at night).
Here&#39;s why. I saw the footage over three weeks ago, and my recollections are slightly fuzzy. I didn&#39;t nail down the scene locations from the artists (heck, they&#39;re so overworked, they don&#39;t even CARE as long as it&#39;s what the director wanted). I didn&#39;t edit my email to Harry as carefully as I should have. And the shots I saw were only 10 to 20 seconds long, because that&#39;s what the fx people are working on.
About Treebeard, well, by square, I shopuld have said rectangular, as his face is certainly longer than it is wide, and it is treelike.
Finally, rotoscoping was the term used by my artist friend when describing his work on the footage replacing Andy&#39;s body with Gollum&#39;s CG, or I wouldn&#39;t have remembered it.
While the effects might not be perfect now, Jackson won&#39;t release a trailer without stunning finished scenes...and whether they wind up in the final film is up to him, just like any other movie.
It&#39;s March now. The movie&#39;s due in December. I&#39;m thinking they may need that long to do it right, like the first one. It&#39;s OK by me...as long as they release it on time!
Sorry for the misinformation.

What did you mean "they&#39;ve barely got a look for the character"? Treebeard&#39;s "look" should be nailed down form the animatronic version. They just follow that, right? (Remember Harry describing it on-set, many moons ago? "A Geek in Middle Earth" indeed). ___________ metsrulein2k, it&#39;s synchronicity (I guess there&#39;s only so many giant spider movies :)).

Despite my hopes that PJ will put at least a glimpse of Shelob in TTT, I&#39;m not really worried about leaving her to ROTK. A good cliffhanger can still be left for Frodo and Sam merely by putting them at the entrance of Torech Ungol and giving us a hint of the horrors inside. I think their part of the movie will be captivating with the immense amount of character and relationship development which has to be done just to get us ready for what happens between Frodo, Sam and Gollum after they ascend the Mountains of Shadow. The action hounds will be more than satisfied by the other events in TT - Gandalf vs. Balrog; Eomer&#39;s riders vs. Uruk Hai; Ents vs. Isengard; Helm&#39;s Deep, and maybe even death of Saruman. As for the inclusion of Bombadil in FOTR, I just don&#39;t know how PJ could have done it given the time constraints and done any justice to Bombadil at all. To have him in, you&#39;d have to show what the Old Forest is, have the scene with Willow, have the break at Tom&#39;s place, then have the FANTASTIC barrow downs scene. That&#39;s an extra half hour to 45 minutes of movie right there. To do it any shorter, the scene would have felt like Lothlorien - confusing, and incomplete. But how could PJ have fleshed these scenes out or put Bombadil in? The movie was already 3 hours, and after the first 15 minutes it absolutely flew at a breathless pace. Should he have cut out Caradhras? Shortened the Moria sequence? Shortened the time in Rivendell? Left out Weathertop? Ideally, I&#39;d love to see each of these movies 4-5 hours long to include all this stuff, but commercially it would never happen. Finally, as for the Scouring omission, I&#39;m very comfortable with that. True, this chapter was intended to demonstrate how the hobbits had grown. ***spoilers if you&#39;ve never read the books*** But Frodo and Sam overcame everything to put the ring in the fire. Pippen showed a tremendous growth of character in his empathy for Denethor and his decisiveness in saving Faramir. Merry devoted himself to Theoden and stabbed the Witchking. It was clear long before Scouring that the hobbits would never be the same after their adventures and that they had grown tremendously. I always found Scouring, particularly the Battle of Bywater, to be kind of awkward. The Grey Havens, however, is a fantastic ending, and I hope wholeheartedly that PJ doesn&#39;t shy away from showing how horribly Frodo is wounded by his quest and the sadness of the ringbearers and the elves passing from Middle Earth. As long as ROTK doesn&#39;t end with Aragorn&#39;s coronation ceremony (reminiscent of the dumb dumb dumb Star Wars ending with Han, Chewie, and Luke getting their CMHs) I&#39;ll be happy. As a side note, I wouldn&#39;t worry too much about how Treebeard&#39;s gonna look. So far, this has been like Lee/Howe paintings come to life, and I don&#39;t think that will change. Also, Treebeard can look kind of amusing or goofy - he and the ents had a very humorous, amusing quality in the book...right up until they tore Isengard down. Treebeard shouldn&#39;t look like an imposing badass the first moment he&#39;s on the screen. Part of the magic of the ents is that they change so suddenly and drastically. They&#39;ll be badass enough when they&#39;re ripping down the gates of Isengard.

Wasn&#39;t there a giant spider in &#39;IT&#39;. Which went on to get smoked by a dirty little nerd with his placebo-inhaler. Hehehe, Pennywise the clown, That&#39;s a funny name. :( Clowns scare me. Tim Curry scares me. Giant Spiders scare me.....No wait..I find them entertaining and fun, nevermind. :::::If ignorants is bliss, then you must surly be in Nirvana:::::

DAMN! I got&#39;s betten by not one but two posters. SHIT. You see I read every post before I posted so&#39;s by the time I posted there was new post&#39;s, ie. the ones pointing out the giant spider in &#39;IT&#39;. Hmm, doe&#39;s my memory&#39;s serve me correct? Is what I said true? Hmmm. Errr, O well. :::::If Ignorant&#39;s is bliss. Then you must surly be in Nirvana:::::

....it may as well be done right..... ______ "Yes, Yes, Peter, yes, oooh, ohhh, yes, feels so good... uh..uh...yes, oh Peter... Peter... PETER!"-Harry Knowles reviews LotR on Aint it Cool News ______________ An exclusive interview with Ray Stokes who plays the Balrog in the movie - "I&#39;ll tell you one thing - that suit was fucking hot!" _____________ Most of the film&#39;s 100 million dollar budget went on emotion rendering software for Sean Bean&#39;s face... __________ 78% OF ALL LORD OF THE RINGS FANS ARE LIARS, CLAIMS SURVEY An exclusive survey has revealed that the vast majority of people who claim to have read JRR Tolkien&#39;s Lord of the Rings trilogy are lying through their teeth. "The reality is that

in the book at least, the kid with the inhaler killed a giant floating eyeball (a bit like Sauron). Then he gets his arm bitten off in the mouth of the spider (a bit like Beren in The Silmarillion). He then destroys the Ring and sails away from the Grey Havens into the Uttermost West (a bit like, um, erm ....?)

Everyone is entitled to their opinions...but this is specifically addressed to all those Talkbalkers who hated the Fellowship of the Ring, or called it boring...whatever.
Please explain to me how your negative experience can be so much at odds with the results posted on Rottentomatoes.com
Sampling the most prominent movie critics throughout the country, the FOTR scored an incredible 96%
"freshness". Of 112 Reviews sampled, 107 were positive, while ONLY 5 were negative.
I sometimes wonder if you folks harbor a secrete animosity towards Peter Jackson&#39;s epic, because it blows away your precious Star Wars.
Incidentally, The Phantom Menance scored a 59% Freshness rating. Of the 97 reviews sampled, 57 were positive, 40 were negative.

Just because a person didn&#39;t like FOTR doesn&#39;t automatically make them a SW fan. It is possible for a non SW fan to not like FOTR as well. Just seems whenever someone says they didn&#39;t like the movie people say "Oh go back to your stupid ass SW blah blah blah." When that particular franchise or any other hasn&#39;t even been mentioned until you brought it up.

You are looking far too deeply into the book!! You have to consider Tolkien in the context of his time. Perhaps he was a xenophobe and a homophobe, but that doesn&#39;t mean that his books influenced those guys who killed Matthews Shepard. Just because there are some coincidental things between that crime and the LOTR books does not mean the books caused them to kill Shepard. To place blame on Tolkien&#39;s books for that crime is foolishness. Look no farther than the criminals themselves if you&#39;re looking to assign blame. Every person is in charge of himself and is capable of making their own decisions. A fifty year old set of books whose references are cloudy to say the least are hardly worthy of your wrath.

... I just re-read my rant about they sour puss knuckleheads that keep pissing and moaning about how a raggeedy ass celluloid crapfest (obviously they know something the rest of us lowbrows don&#39;t) like FOTR gets 13 Oscar noms. Nope, sorry didn&#39;t use the word immature. If you&#39;re going to respond at least address something I actually said...

I just finished watching the Osbournes on MTV, and coming to this TB it&#39;s like I went from watching the show to walking into the frickin house. Hilarious hijinks ensue!
Seriously, I heard the ratings were good for Sierra to create a new AOTCvLOTR videogame to follow on the AvP franchise. I found TPM to be &#39;great taste, less filling&#39;, but AOTC might be the import quality I want to savor... Mmm, lightsabers (oh yeah, and NSync).
Honestly it seems like SW fans wait just as impatiently for LOTR posts as the LOTR fans do, fingers poised above the Talkback button, and a few times viceversa.

Yeah isn&#39;t AI great? I got the DVD today and the effects are about the best I&#39;ve seen, definately the best of the year, meaning it doesn&#39;t have a chance of picking up the Oscar... The Academy never gets that category right. Pearl Harbor was good effects-wise and the only effect in FOTR that stood out to me was the seamless shrinking of the hobbits, but every single shot of AI is mind boggling. And damn that Osbournes show is funny.

I saw the subject line "Pud&#39;s last post" and thought maybe Pud was announcing that he was leaving the boards. But praise the Lord, I was wrong (as usual)!! He&#39;s back, firing on all cylinders. And Highfalutin&#39;s here too, attacking LOTR on a LOTR talkback, instead of an AOTC one, for a change (well, we can hope!). Btw, anyone seen Bashrkillsrite lately (or whatever the hell he was called)? I kind of miss him now he&#39;s gone.... (And why do I want to see pointless silly trolling, I hear you ask? I find it amusing.... or maybe I&#39;m just drunk, I don&#39;t know...)

And I can&#39;t take seriously any journalist who doesn&#39;t know the difference between "Elvish" and the Black Speech ;-). _________ BTW, to set against what I said earlier about poor FOTR box office in Japan, FOTR is now the #1 movie of all time in Russia, beating Titanic :-).

What&#39;s with you people and spiders? Nuff already. I doubt very much that PJ is looking in his palantir and losing sleep on what we say. He&#39;ll cut TT where he thinks is a good dramatic point and that&#39;s it. Just be grateful that he&#39;s got more money now to do a polished job. Sure we&#39;ll still hate some things, but who&#39;s willing to miss seeing the last two parts? Nobody. That&#39;s who.

man, this is one long talkback. i started to get a headache scrolling down through the whole thing. but that&#39;s okay. i just love seeing THIS MANY people loving movies and sharing that love. i&#39;m so damn fucking obsessed with cinema, it&#39;s pretty damn unbelievable. and i love to see people getting so choked over other people&#39;s movie opinions. sure, it seems silly. but i go through it everyday. i take my damn opinions so seriously, and i want others to take them seriously as well. cuz well, i&#39;m right. anyways, another good ol&#39; LOTR vs. AOTC talkback. always good. of course, as i&#39;ve said before, i&#39;m looking more forward to Attack than Two Towers. for lots of reasons. but i still liked Fellowship. all this bullshit about "Bored of the Rings" is just that: bullshit. the movie wasn&#39;t boring. it just wasn&#39;t. the movie was in too much of a hurry to be boring. now of course, it shouldn&#39;t have been in a hurry. Fellowship was supposed to be slow. and it wasn&#39;t. unfortunately. and as for the FX work in Fellowship, i have great problems with the CGI. there was just way too fucking much of it. i don&#39;t like CGI very much at all. it works at times (Jurassic Park, Titanic, Starship Troopers), but it&#39;s extremely fucking rare. and Jackson and everyone at WETA just littered the whole picture with CGI and it was at times, quite unnecessary. the "shrinking" of the hobbits, rather, was amazing. that was great work. i don&#39;t think it deserves the FX Oscar (that should go to Pearl Harbour), but it DOES deserve the nomination. as for Shelob, i don&#39;t mind not seeing a giant spider at the end of the movie. who fucking cares? it&#39;ll be mostly CGI and therefore generally unimpressive. but i DO care that the ending will be altered. as a friend of mine pointed out last night, the filmmakers probably just want to end the movie on less of a downer. and even though i can understand that, it&#39;s bloody stupid. i just finished reading the trilogy for the first time about a month ago. i remember finishing Two Towers just before Fellowship the movie came out, and getting so excited about seeing that final scene in the middle movie: Sean Astin banging into a door, helpless, while Frodo is half-dead and now in the hands of Orcs. FUCK! it was gonna be great! Sean Astin pummelling that door, then sinking to the ground, his hand in his hands, sobbing, then... FADE OUT. shit. woulda been beautiful. but that&#39;s not what we&#39;re gonna get. which is really too bad. so anyways, i can&#39;t wait for May 16th to see Attack of the Clones. i can&#39;t wait to see the opening crawl and the words in yellow "Episode II: Attack of the Clones." but i also will be looking forward to The Two Towers. i know it will have problems, it will have faults, and it will most likely not be a favourite movie of mine of this year, but it will be still worth my money.

.... and when it&#39;s off, caps lock is off. OK? I&#39;ll try and think of a mnemonic so you can remember that. Or you could just look at what you type (though no one else will if you keep using all caps....)

you&#39;re totally right. It&#39;s awesome to see so many people with a knowledge and passion for film. Although there are a few idiots, I&#39;ll be back here. Definately. But with so many awesome (hopefully) movies, how can you not be pre-occupied while waiting for TT? AOTC, TT, Blade 2, Spider-Man, and Resident Evil should be the ballot for best picture next year. And the winner is..........? What other movies are you guys looking forward to this year?

Smeagol was a Stoorish hobbit, the Stoors being broader and heavier than the Fallohides (from which the Tooks and Brandybucks are descended) or the Harfoots. Incidentally, Grima Wormtongue, while technically a Harfoot, is a distant relative of the Took family, which explains why Pippin is so distraught when Grima slits his own throat in despair after being humiliated by Eowyn at Minas Morgul.

ebonic plague: hell yeah with the werewolves! Black Hawk Down would&#39;ve certainly been more interesting that way (and maybe the first trailer - that I was forced to watch 5 times before FOTR... SHEESH! - would&#39;ve been way better too... "Knockin&#39; on Heaven&#39;s Door" my ass...). *As for Arwen in TTT, well, there is that whole reforging of Narsil, doing the banner thing. She&#39;ll show up with her brothers and some other elves to deliver both (and have a quickie with Aragorn behind a tree, not realising that it is in actuality a horny huorn). And speaking of Elladan and Elrohir, was I the only person that noticed them at the council meeting. You know, the two young Elrond-alikes sitting between Aragorn and Elrond and acting very "joined at the hip"? I was actually pissed off that they weren&#39;t mentioned in the end credits, while Gil-Galad (who I&#39;ve been totally unable to pick out in the opening fight scenes) is mentioned. *As for the ending, I have every confidence PJ can knock out a great end, but it can&#39;t possibly beat the book ending of TTT (IMHO the finest cliffhanger ever). And no, it&#39;s not just the giant spider thrills, but rather the way that the ending brings together all the relationship and thematic strands forged during TTT (Gollum&#39;s betrayal, Sam&#39;s love for Frodo and growth into someone who will put the ring on to fulfill the mission). PJ wants TTT to be about the relationships between the three characters, so moving the defining point in their relationships (okay, Frodo saving Gollum from Faramir&#39;s archers was pretty defining too) to the next film is a bit odd... The next best ending for cliffhanger material would be Aragorn and the others going to the paths of the dead, and the camera cutting away just as the dead start coming, and then Gollum leading Frodo and Sam to the entry of Shelob&#39;s lair. Then the camera swoops down into the darkness and we see a glimpse of something truly horrible lying in wait for them... End credits. Still, since Shelob was moved mostly to get the time strands to parallel, I doubt this end will happen. Here&#39;s hoping for a great end! *Oh, and are they fuckin&#39; gonna add the 4 minutes to reels outside the US too? We Europeans want it too!!! Hand it over, boys!

**** Don&#39;t know if this is a spoiler alert or not ****
Is that scene with Gandalf and the Balrog intended to be in the trailer? I bloody hope not. There should be no reference to Gandalf whatsoever. Yeah, sure, so most of the audience will likely know that Gandalf still has a major part to play in the story. But for those that don&#39;t, his return is hardly likely to be an emotional moment if they&#39;ve already been primed to expect it from the trailer.

&#39;LOTR yesterday, LOTR today, and blimey, if it it don&#39;t look like LOTR again tomorrer,&#39; said one of the trolls.
&#39;Never a blinking bit of Jediflesh have we had for long enough,&#39; said a second. &#39;What the &#39;ell elfkiller was a-thinkin&#39; of to bring us into this talkback at all, beats me- and the drink runnin&#39; short, what&#39;s more,&#39; he said jogging the elbow of elfkiller, who was taking a pull at his ... jug.
elfkiller choked, &#39;Shut yer mouth!&#39; he said as soon as he could. &#39;Yer can&#39;t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be trolled by you and Pud. You&#39;ve trolled a page and a half between yer, since we got banned from theforce.net. How much more d&#39;yer want? And time&#39;s been up our way, when yer&#39;d have said "thank yer elfkiller" for a nice bit o&#39; fat valley Tolkien fan like what this is.&#39; He took a big bite off a fanboy&#39;s leg he was toasting, and wiped his lips on his sleeve.

I just happen to have a mnenomic that can be easily commited to memory: Spacehunter, Using Caps Knowledgeably Means You Demonstrate Intellegent Computer Kindness-and that goes for the rest of you trolls.

If you ever have any trouble remembering the correct spelling of the name SPACEHUNTER3-D, Just remember : Spacehunter Prefers Anal Cramming Entertainment with Horny Uncle Ned Typically Entering Rectally 3 times Daily. I hope this helps.

I&#39;m committing it to memory as we speak :-). (See? Now wouldn&#39;t this TB be dull without the trolls. And Spacepervert, that was hilarious :D). ____________ *SPOILERS* Mithril, re Arewn bringing Anduril to Aragorn, there&#39;s a strong rumor Anduril isn&#39;t reforged until the start of ROTK, so it will apparently be presented as a mark of Aragorn&#39;s Kingship, to be used in the last battle gainst Sauron.

Folks, I only signed up for this message board just so I could tell you all that 80% of the users are ignorant, needlessly foul-mouthed, maggots who wouldn&#39;t know a good movie if it beat their brains in. BTW I&#39;m a Star Wars fan, but Lucas has lost it. If ATOC is better than TPM I&#39;ll be amazed, and it would have to be a heck of alot better to be any good at all. LOTR has most movies out there today whipped in all aspects. Those who deny it, just don&#39;t understand. And as far as Tolkien&#39;s work being racist or sexist: come on. Find something real to complain about.

Look, I only see FOTR once, so in the world of cyber-geeks I&#39;m essentially a neophyte. During my one viewing a few things struck me. The production values of real things (sets, clothing, lighting, etc) were astounding. Top notch stuff. Jackson&#39;s people put great care into creating that world. The action sequences were mostly excellent too (though the opening one was laughably bad). The CGI, regardless of Oscar nominations (sorry, I put as much stock in Oscars as I do in Pauly Shore&#39;s career), was often nice and quite a few times wretched. The opening battle sequence looked horrible with the humans and such getting smacked around by the bearer of the ring. The first time we see the white-haired Saruman cat he&#39;s strolling out of an obviously CGI building and you can clearly see he&#39;s superimposed. Several other shots of the fellowship coming onto sets look incredibly fake because the background CGI or mattes (I&#39;m guessing CGI in 2001), looked "off". At several points during the mines of moria sequence we see the fellowship darting through the dungeons and they&#39;re obviously computer animated people...Gandalf looked like he had a motor on his ass at one point because he was moving so fast. It wasn&#39;t a bad movie, but the CGI at times was horrendously bad.

I thought the opening scenes were just awesome. Incredible. However, depends on how in focus the projector is. The detail is so intense and they&#39;re all so small that if it&#39;s off it looks blurry. See it on a good screen and it is simply shockingly good. I had to scrape my jaw off the floor.

I thought the opening scenes were just awesome. Incredible. However, depends on how in focus the projector is. The detail is so intense and they&#39;re all so small that if it&#39;s off it looks blurry. See it on a good screen and it is simply shockingly good. I had to scrape my jaw off the floor.

of course it was, MM. They only got a walk-on for Fellowship, on account of having rocks for brains. Here are my spoilers for Clones, Two Towers and Chamber of Secrets ***** Frodo SkyPotter is persecuted by his horrible family, the Sackville-Dursleys when one day he finds a gold ticket in a chocolate bar and flys away in a giant peach accompanied by Hangrid Badger Solo, a gruff burly mercenary. Meanwhile a colony of stoats invade his beloved hobbit hole and laser his relatives. Two amusing chinese beggars, one an endomorph and one a mesomorph, talk in iambic pentameter and dig a few graves.
GrAslan the Grey, a pompous old short green buffoon with a beard and a nice line in inscrutable sayings reveals that Thulsa Vadermort the Snow Bitch killed his father, no is his father, no is his mother, and is searching for the three handled moss covered family gradunza that will allow him to take over the Hundred-Acre Forest.
The Fellowship of the Ming sets out to the Wizard of Woz, composed of four humourous short guys, a pointy-eared weirdo called Spock-galad, a scarecrow, a tin guy who starts out in a prequel with no skin at all, and a hard guy in a red shirt and viking helmet who dies at the end of the first 20 minutes. They fight through hordes of StormStoat Uruk Klingon-Hai to throw the three handled moss covered family gradunza into the bog of eternal stench. David Bowie steals the palantir.
ENID BLYTON SUES THEM.
HOMER SUES ENID BLYTON.
end.

What? No Shelob in TTT? What!!!! Correct me if I&#39;m wrong, but isn&#39;t that basically the BEST DAMN PART IN THE WHOLE FUCKIN BOOK? Wasn&#39;t that pretty much the HIGHLIGHT AND CLIMAX of the whole story? Great. Just Great. Now I have to sit through a neutered version of TTT. Excuse me. I have to go jump off a damn bridge.

...with RAPE in mind! Methinks both Lucas and Jackson will survive the assault. *** The preceding parable was copied wholly or in part from my post in the new Star Wars TB. All copyrights waived. *** Now then, I for one am damn relieved this TB&#39;s fallen out of the "prime position," whoever it was that was griping about Mo&#39;s AOTC/ATOC/TACO script review getting bumped. Because now, hopefully, there will be far fewer of the type of people who complain about a TB being in the "prime position." GEEZ did this TB get crowded in the last 16 hours! Like I&#39;m going to wade through all the same horse-apples that&#39;ve been clogging the pipes here for years. YAWN. I&#39;ll check back in a coupla days. *** But first: morGoth, nobody likes a show-off! ;) But nice hosing nonetheless. *** Miami: If I can do some small part in justifying the expense of a new turntable--a device which should be active in every home in America and abroad--than I&#39;d be honored to tell ya to BURN IT UP! *** Muh muh muh muh MOATERS ya ol connexions dog, ya! It&#39;s a pleasure as always to watch you go to work. Hey--You and elanor should get a van, some costumes, and fight crime! Acid-Tongue Moaters and the Flame-Retardant Hobbitess...! On second thought, better come up with your own superhero nicknames. *** Dan Caputi, you cretin, go back to your cave like the slinking stinking Olorin that you are. Save your scant wit for those ridiculous "did the Wormtongue have wings?" and "What color was Valinor&#39;s hair?" flame wars. (For the record: "Yes" and "2 parts magenta, 1 part black, 3 parts cyan")

Three OS for the Macs under the sky,
Seven for the Linnux in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal DOS doomed to die,
One for the dark Programmer on his dark Computer In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie.
One OS to rule them, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them and in the darkness bind them, in the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie

Man, these Phantom SHITTER fanatics make me fucking laugh, how fucking pathetic that they have to defend a piece of shit that didn&#39;t win any oscars, that was nominated for several Razzies (WORST OF THE YEAR AWARDS) and have made put the SW prequels to complete shame. Not only that, but the trailers to Attack of the Clones (Could George Lucas have come up with a more pathetic name?) have killer lines like "My Ani, how you&#39;ve grown" and "It&#39;s all Obi-Wan&#39;s fault" and "I&#39;m much too frightened to tease a senator" FUCKING PATHETIC! To top it all off we now have fucking N&#39;Sync making complete asses out of theirselves in front of the camera. All hope is not lost however, Peter Jackson has delievered the best science fiction film in over a decade, The Fellowship of the Ring, which has already won several British Academy Awards, and has an excellent chance of winning best picture of 2001! FUCK A.O.T.C. WE WANT TO SEE THE TWO TOWERS! George Lucas&#39; best days were over fifteen years ago as he hasn&#39;t delivered a decent film since Willow! FUCK TPM and FUCK THE PREQUELS!

"I&#39;m not sure I got the spelling of your screen name right, but here we go. You state "at least with an SW film you know it&#39;s straight with nothing queer about it." Even TPM? Let&#39;s face it, this is a movie about 2 grown men who go take a young boy away from his mother. Do you really think there&#39;s "nothing queer" about that?"
FUCKING AYE! FUCK TPM!

HEy TMPSUCKED, Don&#39;t care what you think, don&#39;t care if our movie got nominated for Oscars, Don&#39;t care what you think about SW at all. I know I liked it. Lot&#39;s of people like it. Some people didn&#39;t. If it sucked so bad-it wouldn&#39;t have earned the money it did. But all that doesn&#39;t mean a damned thing, you know why? CAUSE THIS IS A FRICKEN TB about LOTR! They should start deletinng not topic postings such as yours...and mine-cuase it really dosen&#39;t have anything to do with The Two Towers. I liked Lord of the Rings too. Course, Jackson had a good story to start with-Lucas is creating his own.

You probably don&#39;t remember me. I went away for a while but I missed my fellow geeks so I came to visit. My message about SW vs. LOTR: All of you are going to go see both even if only because it will give you something to argue about over christmas time. I can&#39;t wait:
"Jackson rules, T2T kicked AOTC ass!!" "No way man, its homophobic and the CGI was shite. Lucas is the King!" "Shut up you stupid troll" "No, you shut up you homo"...and so on. Like I said, I can&#39;t wait! Oh yeah, and the movies look good too.

First of all, what are the 2 Towers? Orthanc and Barad-Dur? Orthanc and Cirith Ungol? Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul? what? No one even knows this yet they continue to drawl out commentary on a movie they don&#39;t even understand...
Second, why doesn&#39;t Sauron disappear when he wears the ring? Also, the ring seems to fit the 12 foot tall Sauron just as well as the 3 foot hobbit. That Sauron must have had thin-faggot fingers.

Fuck Frodo, fuck Gandalf, fuck Pippin, fuck all those stupid fuckers. LoTR sucks balls. FoTR was one of the worst movies I saw last year. Who the FUCK CARES ABOUT STUPID HOBBITS AND SHIT?! Go watch a real movie, and GROW UP! I repeat, GROW UP! This movie had lame, shitty dialogue, and fuck, if you think this was one of the best movies ever (or even of last year) and you&#39;re above 12... well again, grow up. Leave this stuff for the kids and see a real movie.

How do I reply directly to a message? Anyway these are easy answers:
>First of all, what are the 2 Towers? Orthanc and Barad-Dur? Orthanc and Cirith Ungol?
Got it right on your second guess. The first half of the book deals with Orthanc and the second half leads up to Cirith Ungol.
>No one even knows this yet they continue to drawl out commentary on a movie they don&#39;t even understand...
The movie is based on a book which lots of people have read. However I don&#39;t know who you&#39;re talking about so they may be just dumb
>Second, why doesn&#39;t Sauron disappear when he wears the ring?
Because Sauron MADE the ring. It holds no power over him. The rings give power according to their weilder.
>Also, the ring seems to fit the 12 foot tall Sauron just as well as the 3 foot hobbit. That Sauron must have had thin-faggot fingers.
It&#39;s a magic ring. In the account left by Isildur it actually *shrunk* when it fell off Sauron&#39;s finger and was away from the heat of it&#39;s maker.

Cheers for those answers, Elffromspace, but I&#39;m not finished. Even though I know you&#39;re right about the 2 towers, I think Orthanc and Barad-Dur makes more sense - as they represent the two seperate and independent threats to the free peoples. The tower of Cirith Ungol is hardly even mentioned in The Two Towers, but alas...
What is Sauron? A large eye? Is he floating in a tank like that blob from "Dune"? Does he have any good qualities or is he pure evil (like the Undertaker)? Are orcs immortal? Observation - Orcs represent the proletariat - downtrodden and working in atrocious conditions - their bickering and jabbering is funny and interesting in the book - I don&#39;t see how the monsters PJ used in FOTR will be able to carry that off in TTT.
In ROTJ, Ben Kenobi says that Luke and Leia were hidden from their father at birth. As Anakin grew up on Tatooine, why choose Tatooine as the hiding place for Luke? And why choose a dork like Owen Lars as guardian? TPM was a childish movie aimed at selling video games - worst line "mom, you said the problem with the universe is that nobody helps each other" (or something).
I&#39;m finished.

Jeez, wonder why. People had been a lot ruder than him. I presume it&#39;s a he, anyway. I&#39;ve never understood the whole banning thing. It&#39;s like it&#39;s okay to be a complete and utter bastard, but not just a bit of a bastard. Oh well.

To add to what elanor said, here are two quotes from Tolkien&#39;s Letters: "The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 and 4; and can be left ambiguous - it might refer to Isengard and Barad-d

dude, THAT was Gil-galad?! God, I always took that to be Elrond. Will keep my eyes peeled on 6th viewing... or maybe I should just wait for the DVD and go frame-by-frame. You and Vanyar better be right about this. I just expected Gil-galad to wear a head dress of some kind, maybe a gold band around his head or something. But sheesh, these elves do sure look alike. Honestly, Gil-galad, wear a helmet or crown, will you! Cut your hair short, you hippie! Jeezus, would it kill the elves to have some distinguishing marks? An eye-patch after a nasty fight with a balrog, maybe?

1.) You know I have been thinking over and over again of ways to make the Shelob plot in ROTK work but, come someone help me, IT JUST DOESN&#39;T ADD UP!!!
2.) SPOILER: READ ONLY IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW THE RING IS DESTROYED
Well, if you read the LOTR series, you know that Gollum destroys the ring by accidentally falling into the fires of mount doom while celebrating having "his precious" back after biting Frodo&#39;s finger off to get it. Is it me, or does it seem that having the ring destroyed by accident seem kind of lame. I mean, I thought of the irony of both Sauron and Frodo both losing a finger to the ring,and Gollum&#39;s desire finally killing him, but can someone please help me with this?!

okay maybe not, but i wish i was! words cannot express how much FotR rocks...i am totally obsessed (ask my friends. i snapped at 2 of them in elvish cause they wouldnt listen to me..."LASTO BETH NIN!!!"). i dont think i can last 9 months, 6 hours and 47 minutes until TTT comes out!!!! i cant wait until march 29 either when the ttt trailer comes out! just have to say...good job to:
Elijah Wood (who just might be reading this right now since he said he was a frequent visitor of AICN...)
Ian McKellen (who was HILARIOUS last night on SNL...)
Sean Astin (congrats on the baby!)
Dominic Monaghan(no fair, he got to go surfing!!! and paraponting!! and his b-day is the same as a friend of mine)
Billy Boyd (his birthday is the day before mine. but im not 32, im 13 1/2...must remember the 1/2)
Orlando Bloom (dude, my friend has a HUGE crush on Orli...)
Christopher Lee (he SCARED me with the "Cuiva nwalca Carnirass